Wheee! A long while ago in school I made a type specimen brochure for Neutraface No. 2. Click the picture above or this link to see the PDF version. The printed version looks a bit different. I’ll try to post pics sometime.

Hey Everybody! I recently made this new brain/neuron fabric and gift wrap! I made a giant brain pillow for my psychiatrist too, and he seemed to like it which was awesome! :) Here are some pics! Also, the fabric, gift wrap, and wall paper are available on spoonflower here: http://www.spoonflower.com/fabric/3713721

This is a survey by NAMI about experiences with ER mental health services. I believe the survey is for both people with mental illness and friends/family who have experienced the ER mental health situation. Please take the survey to help improve ER mental health treatment. I hope by taking this survey ERs will listen to how to improve things!

I’m taking an information design class this term, and for my first project I thought I’d make a graphic about why we should be more concerned about vaccine-preventable disease than Ebola. Here are some shots of the graphics I made. It was actually printed out pretty large for the assignment. You should be able to click on the images to enlarge them somewhat for better reading.

Oh wow! You just got your MacBook Pro Retina and installed CS6 only to discover that the text and icons are jaggy! AHHH! TOTALLY SUCKS! Don’t worry, there is an easy fix. All you need to do is open Photoshop, go to the Help tab and click UPDATES. (I’m including a screenshot).

It will open the application manager which will download and run the updates that are needed. It should update all of your CS6 apps, so they look beautiful and crisp. See the before and after above (note, the png takes away a bit of the crispness). You’d think when you *just* installed CS6 it would have automatically updated everything, but no. Anyway, this is painless and you’ll be happy with the results!

Hey! You just got a new MacBook Pro with Retina display and you want to read your favorite books with the Kindle app, right? Well, you might notice that if you downloaded the Kindle app from the Apple app store, the text is blurry. BUMMER! Don’t despair! Try this fix before you cry. Delete your Kindle app that you downloaded from the App store, and deregister your Kindle for that device. Then go to the Amazon store and get the Kindle app there. Here is a LINK as of 4/6/14. Install this app instead of the other one. It might say you are attempting to over-write a newer file. That is fine. This app from the amazon store is the one you want! It should fix your blurry situation. Be sure to register this app so you can get all of your books. I hope this helps! :)

Hey Everybody! If you are reading this blog, you might know my name–Kristin Bell. Well, there is another Kristin Bell, Kristin Bell-Murray to be exact, who could really use your help. She needs brain and spinal surgery and is trying to raise the money to pay for it. Kristin and I met years ago…if I remember correctly, I was googling my name or something and I came upon her site. It was either that or she was one of the Kristin Bells who I friended on Facebook when I was trying to friend ALL of the Kristin Bells on FB. lol. Anyway, she lives in Canadialand, that great country up North, but they won’t pay for her surgery. HUGE BUMMER! She is a singer-songwriter, but has been somewhat sidelined by pain and problems relating to what she needs surgery for. So, if you are able and would like to help out with a donation of any size, here is her fundraising page: http://www.gofundme.com/5xc34w . Also, here is her blog if you’d like to find out more about her struggles/issues: http://kbm-idlehands.blogspot.com/

This is our 2013 Christmas tree. It has a few Hello Kitties, but mostly it has my Winter collection of Starbucks Bears. :) There are also a few ornaments on it, but not many compared to how many ornaments we actually have! lol. The Winter Starbucks bears also include some of my Chinese New Year Bearista bears. :) Happy Holidays everybody! :)

Dear Interwebs,
I’m tired of constantly debating women’s peoples’ bodies. I’m tired of it being the sole focus of so much conversation. I’m tired of “healthy” this and “unhealthy” that. I’m tired of “men want meat not bones” and “eww, gross, you are so fat!” I’m tired of all the health-nut trollers. And I’m even tired of trying to get the health-nut trollers to understand how they are not helpful. I’m tired of ranting about how fat is not the devil. I’m tired of all of the tired “debate” (*cough* yelling *cough*) about how obesity is the single biggest plague on society. I’m tired of having photo competitions to show who is sexiest—fat, skinny, fit, unfit, tall, short, round, normal bodied, differently bodied, tattooed, maimed, jaundiced, oompa-loompa-tanned, blonde, brown, lumpy, frumpy, dimpled, ab-rocking, make-overed, pierced, Barbie, grungy, blah blah blah, etc.—why can we NOT stop talking about bodies?!? Do we all have some form of body? Why yes, yes, we do. I think we can all pretty much agree on that. There are no brains in jars being pushed around on carts that I know of. Yes, our bodies are wonderful and amazing, but can’t we PLEASE PLEASE quit talking about them for five seconds?!? Every day it is a firestorm of shit about people are too fat, people are too thin, people are healthy, people look this way, people look that way, OMG Becky, LOOK AT HER BUTT!!!

Why are we all incessantly patrolling each and every body part of each other? Dude, it is sooooo out of control! Stop the madness! Calgon take me away! So, in an effort to alleviate some of this nonsense, here are a few examples of topics to discuss with your neighbor. You don’t have to discuss heavy world politics or anything (like anyone understands THAT anyway)! JUST SOMETHING ELSE, PLEASE! I’m going to try to make these topics as banal and non-controversial as possible.

Now, there’s a list of ten things that are rarely discussed on Facebook and the rest of the interwebs. I’m sure if you try hard enough, you can think of many more things to add to the list, and so can I. The next time you are tempted to post about weight loss/gain, your new healthy cleanse/diet/lifestyle, someone else’s (or your own) boobs, thighs, butt, flabby/not flabby arms, how someone is too skinny/fat/unhealthy/healthy/lazy/beautiful/ugly, how the world needs to be changed because people are too fat/skinny/unhealthy/healthy/blah de de blah, etc., well, just consult this list of banal topics. Now, I am not talking about eliminating critiques of culture/body culture all together, but if all you (or I) am going to add is blah blah blah GARBAGE, ill-conceived nonsense and old tired tropes to the conversation, PLEASE put down the keyboard and WALK, CRAWL, SCOOT, LEAVE, GO AWAY FROM the computer! Interwebs, you are just making me too tired to even stare at the screen for hours on end! How dare you!

Oh my gosh you guys! So, I’ve been making fabric using spoonflower.com. And a nice woman who makes scrubs (medical) hats and things found my fabric and turned them into hats! Here is the link to her ebay store: http://www.ebay.com/usr/laserjill

The thought of doctors and nurses walking around with Judy the Utie on their heads just makes me smile inside and out! How wonderful! I’m including her pics of the hats! And here is the link to my fabric: http://www.spoonflower.com/fabric/1125213

I’m also going to be doing more fabrics with organs. lol. For example, Hearty Arty featured here: http://www.spoonflower.com/designs/2660407 (and below), which isn’t for sale yet, because I have to get a sample first. :) Soon though! :)

I’m pretty excited about how my octopus fabric turned out! It is totally weird! lol I drew the picture of the octopus on my iPad, and then got it printed through Spoonflower: http://www.spoonflower.com/fabric/2624270. I am not sure how I’m going to use the fabric just yet, but I thought I’d share it with you all! :) Oh, this is one yard of fabric.

Well, I posted about my dog pics that I’ve been drawing. And I used spoonflower.com to print two of the dog portraits for my psychiatrist. These are his two dogs. Anyway, I made pillows! Yay! I think they are pretty cool! :) :) I hope he likes them!

So, I’ve been doing some new drawings on my new iPad using ArtRage, and I made a little video about doing one of the drawings that I thought I’d share. I’m also posting four of the dogs that I’ve drawn so far. :)

Okay, so if you haven’t heard, Abercrombie & Fitch clothing is made of human assholes and excrement. Yes, you heard me right! Abercrombie & Fitch, who defended their NO PLUS SIZES policy by saying that they didn’t want uncool and fat people sporting their brand, is now going to carry some plus size clothing and accessories, because their stock has tanked. Let me just say to Abercrombie & Fitch, YOU CAN SUCK IT! I hope your company dies in the stinking ball of hate from which it was formed. Sure, there are other companies that also discriminate against fat people, but Abercrummy & Filth was very vocal about their hatred of us fatties and how we are not good enough to don their crappy wares. I would, of course, love to see all of the clothing companies that don’t include fatties in their agenda wiped off the planet, but I will settle first for the much belated death of Abercrummy & Filth.

This year is the 30th anniversary of the publishing of Shadow on a Tightrope by Aunt Lute Books, and there is a blog carnival this week for the book! I am so happy to be participating. I can’t think of a lot of books that have changed my life, but I would say that this one has. I was about 19 years old when I first picked up SOAT. I was bulimic and fat, and had always been told that being fat was the worst thing in the world to be. In high school I had starved myself down to a “normal” weight, but I gained back some of the weight by the time I was 19 when I was trying to starve myself again. I remember being in Seattle at Bailey Coy Books (now out of business) where I found the book, and later reading the book during my lunch break at the University Bookstore where I worked for a short time. I could not believe what I was reading! For one thing, there were these other fat people out there! Who knew?!? And some of them had endured horrendous surgeries that I didn’t know existed back then (which are all too common now). AND then they were saying that fatness wasn’t the horrid devil wrapped in bacon strips that I had always been told it was! WHAT?!? Did I read that correctly? I didn’t know it at the time, but the book forever changed my outlook on fat and fat activism. Maybe not all at once, but it all stayed with me. It found a little space in my brain, and when everyone else and all of society screamed at me to be thin I remembered the words in SOAT. I remembered (for once) that this experience of being fat was not something I had to do alone, and even though I didn’t stop the bulimia for years, and hated myself for being fat a lot, the messages from SOAT were there working their magic. And, I really think it was like magic that these words in a book could so profoundly alter my view of the world. Years later I stopped the bulimia, and I now consider myself to be a fat activist of sorts, and SOAT is still helping me to figure out how to live with my body and how to live with a world that hates my body. I am forever indebted to Aunt Lute and all of the people who put the book together. I hope that this book can get in the hands of more fat people just so they know that it doesn’t have to be like this, they don’t have to hate themselves, and they aren’t alone.